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Previously, I summarized the first half of my survey course from this past fall. Here’s an annotated summary of the second half of the course. (Readings and syllabus are available on the web here.)

Weeks 9 and 10. Talking about God.

I spent three class periods on this material, spending the first day on selections from Maimonides’ Guide, the second day on Aquinas on analogy (ST 1a Q13), and the third day on Scotus on univocity (Ordinatio I.3.1, using the selection in the old Hackett volume by Wolter).

It’s really quite easy to pull together a manageable selection of writings from Maimonides, and there are a lot of accessible topics there to be discussed — not just the negative theology, but also the esotericism, and various further issues that arise in the course of his discussion. So this struck me as an unqualified success.

The material in Aquinas makes for quite a natural companion to the Maimonides reading, and of course his theory of analogy has as strong a claim to the canon as anything he wrote.

The reading from Scotus is, however, just brutally difficult, even though Wolter helpfully abridges the original text. (John van den Bercken has a new translation of the whole of Ordinatio I.3 (Fordham UP), which I didn’t use only because I wanted the abridgement!) I included the reading because the doctrine of univocity seemed to me extremely important, and to be something that students ought to be able to get a grip on, having read Maimonides and Aquinas. But the problem is not the doctrine itself, but trying to cope with Scotus’s arguments for the doctrine, which lie at the outer limits of intelligibility. So if you put this on the syllabus, you are in effect asking students to read something that you can be sure they will not understand. Perhaps teachers ought not to do that!

Weeks 10-11. Freedom and Foreknowledge.

We began by focusing on the problem of divine foreknowledge:

Boethius, Consolation end of IV and all of V

Gersonides, Wars of the Lord Bk. III excerpts

Crescas, Light of the Lord treatise 2 excerpts

For some reason I had never previously used Boethius in a survey class — perhaps just because I have previously tended to regard late antiquity as not properly medieval. But the students just loved this text (particularly after the Scotus reading!), and of course there is no end of things to talk about. Someone who wanted to take the go-slow approach to the survey course couldn’t do much better than work slowly through the Consolation. (I am unsure, however, of what translation is best for philosophical purposes. I used Relihan’s Hackett translation, but with no confidence that this was the best choice. It was, however, clearly better than some translations I consulted, which absolutely mangled the philosophical content.)

Gersonides and Crescas are of course much later, but they make for a nice contrast with Boethius, because whereas medieval Christian authors tend to try to adhere to a broadly Boethian account, these two Jewish authors take radically different positions. Roughly, Gersonides’s approach is to limit divine knowledge to events that are not the product of free human choice. Crescas’ approach is to curtail human freedom. Both readings are relatively accessible. If I do this again, however, I’ll need to be better prepared to defend Gersonides. The students reduced his position to complete nonsense in about 3 minutes, and I was unable to defend him.

Week 12. Libertarian Freedom

Although Scotus is often impossibly difficult, his writings on free will tend to be somewhat more accessible, particularly in the new and very clear translations by Thomas Williams. We looked at the well-known discussion from Questions on the Metaphysics IX.15, and then at the rather technical discussion about divine foreknowledge at Reportatio IA dist. 39-40. Probably the second of these readings was more than the students really needed, and surely it was more than they wanted.

Week 13-14. Metaphysics

It’s a particular sorrow of mine that it is so hard to know how to convey, in the classroom, the riches of later medieval metaphysics. Even if one is content with the comparatively muted pleasures of Aquinas’s metaphysics, it is hard to know what to assign other than the De principiis naturae, which is not much more than juvenalia, and the De ente et essentia, which is, for all its fame, rather obscure. And I do not think the long and difficult discussions of universals and individuation found in Spade’s popular Five Texts are effective at capturing what is most interesting about later medieval metaphysics.

The texts I am most fond of teaching are the ones I used in this class. First, we looked at Book I of Ockham’s Summula philosophiae naturalis, which offers a systematic treatment of matter and form. There seems to be no agreement, among teachers today, about which work of Ockham’s to teach, but it seems to me this is one of the most promising choices. Ockham clearly labored over this text, and hoped it would be a work of the same significance as his Summalogicae. I am not sure why it has not received more attention. I have made an abridged translation, although, after assigning all of it to my students, I now think it could stand to be abridged further. Although parts are reasonably accessible, other parts are extremely hard and long-winded.

Second, we spent a day on the arguments in Autrecourt’s Tractatus for eternalism — that is, for the thesis that nothing comes into or goes out of existence. Again, I’ve made my own translation of this. (Indeed, I’m working on a new translation of the whole work.) What’s fun about this text is that it’s wholly and refreshingly un-Aristotelian. And although it’s difficult, I think the difficulty is manageable.

Third, we spent a day on Buridan’s views on identity over time, again using my own translations. This is not at all difficult. And, again, part of the fun is that the view is very unlike what one would expect from an Aristotelian. In addition, there’s a real puzzle over just how to understand Buridan’s view. Does he think that almost nothing remains the same over time? That’s my reading, but others think he’s instead offering an account of exactly why many things do remain the same over time.

Week 15. Epistemology

Finally, we spent a day on Autrecourt’s well-known skeptical letters, and another day on Buridan’s increasingly well-known discussion of certainty (including moral certainty) in Questions on Metaphysics II.1. At this point, I fear, the students just wanted to be done with obscure medieval texts, but I do think these two short readings work quite well in a survey course.

Final Exam. Obligationes

Rather than give the students a conventional final, I assigned them the task of mastering the medieval rules of Obligatio, following the very clear discussion of the genre in Mikko Yrjonsuuri’s 2000 paper in Theoria. (Actually, there’s a critical mistake in the formalization of the rules on p. 212, but in the version on the course web page I fix the mistake.) Each student had to pass a one-on-one series of questions. I prepared these disputations in advance, and you can see them here, but I am sure others could do a better job than I have at coming up with ingenious sets of questions. In any event, though, it was a pretty fun exercise.

Here’s a guest post on the medieval survey class from Scott Williams (UNC Asheville). Scott sent me an email with some of these thoughts, and I thought it was so interesting that I asked him to write it up in a form I could post.

I have been enjoying Bob’s series of posts on syllabi in Medieval Philosophy. When the call went out for these I was teaching a course called “Islamic Philosophy” and so I sent in that syllabus. I also teach a course called “Medieval Philosophy” that’s more general. I want to say two things about what I learned recently in teaching the Medieval Philosophy course.

First, in the past I taught this course by covering lots of authors from different times and traditions (Pagan Neo-Platonists, Christians, Jews, and Muslims). In Spring 2018 I tried an experiment – I slowed things way down. This decision was inspired in part by the book The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academythat I had read with other faculty members in other departments. I developed a short list of authors, and students spent more time on those authors than they would have in a standard survey. When the course was over and I read the Course Evaluations, I found that students gave the course the highest scores that can be given in numerous categories. Students wrote that they really really appreciated the slow approach. They were tired of “whiplash” courses. In my judgement, these students came to understand the authors much more than past students had. They came to see how different parts of a philosopher’s texts fit together. It’s one thing for students to learn discrete facts about e.g., Al-Farabi on the moral virtues, it’s another thing for students to see how this moral theory fits into an overall model of the place of human beings in the cosmos and in political life. So, instead of having students read only Part 1 (as found in Philosophy in the Middle Ages) of Al-Farabi’s The Political Regime (also called The Principles of Existing Things), they read Part 1 and Part 2.

Here’s one way, among many ways, that slowing down the medieval philosophy course can look. There are many other authors/texts that can be used. (Note: I teach Maimonides in my Islamic Philosophy Course and in some semesters he’s in the general Medieval Phil. course.) This is but one suggestion:

John Marenbon, Medieval Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford Univ. Press, 2016

Document on Moodle (includes Porphyry’s Isagoge. I am contemplating whether to have 2 weeks on Porphyry in the future; we’d likely read On Abstinence from Killing Animals. This contrasts nicely with Boethius’s Treatise Against Eutyches and Nestorius on the rationality condition for ‘persona’).

Schedule:

1 1/2 weeks on Augustine, with 1 day on Porphyry

2 1/2 weeks on Boethius (we read all of The Consolation of Philosophy, and,Treatise Against Eutyches and Nestorius (personhood is the main topic; in a forthcoming publication I argue that Boethius likely invents personhood as a distinct general category (it’s in Person: A History, ed. Antonia LoLordo (OUP))

2 weeks on Christine de Pizan (read most of The Book of the City of Ladies, plus selections from other texts- see the powerpoint for references)

3 weeks on Al-Farabi (we read all of The Political Regime, plus other texts)

6 weeks on Aquinas (we read all of the Treatise on Happiness, Treatise on Human Acts with Commentary)

Second, in most standard surveys of Medieval Philosophy we find no women taught. (I found no women in Bob’s earlier posted list of commonly taught authors, for example.) This is not good, and for several reasons. My attempt to address this was to spend a week on the early 15th c. philosopher Christine de Pizan. Many of my students loved reading her. And, her texts allowed me to address some of the social contexts of medieval (esp. scholastic) philosophers. The way I framed her The Book of the City of Ladieswas that it is Christine’s “summa” in defense of the feminine sex against centuries and centuries of sexism. I had a very positive experience in teaching Christine and plan to continue to teach her in the future and more of her texts. (Hackett has recently published a new translation of Christine de Pizan; so we have a reasonably priced new text to assign.) (I gave a lecture to a general humanities course recently on Christine, and covered highlights of the sorts of things that I discussed in Medieval Philosophy. I’ve attached the powerpoint here.)

I’m writing all this because Bob has been talking to/with those of us who teach Medieval Philosophy, and I thought I should say that we need to teach philosophers who happen to be women too. Not just because they are women, but because they have interesting and important things to say and that we need to learn. My students got more interested in medieval philosophy by reading e.g., Christine de Pizan. By keeping it a male-only affair, I believe we signal to our students that we professors are either ignorant of women philosophers or that we don’t believe they are important enough to teach.

Hopefully in a few years time we will find the most popular medieval philosophy textbook that is assigned in our survey courses to include philosophers like Christine de Pizan. It’s a good idea, and for many good reasons.

Also over the summer, the Vatican announced the opening of the digital Vatican Library, with 15,000 some manuscripts currently available (out of a total collection, in case you were wondering, of 80,000 codices).

Scott Williams has compiled an online bibliography for Henry of Ghent. It runs to 156 pages. (Actually, although the bibliography is what Scott asked me to advertise, it’s just one among many very useful things pertaining to Henry of Ghent that are assembled on this web page.)

Someone else who’s been doing amazing work online is Jeffrey Witt (Loyola Univ. Maryland). A good place to start is with his Scholastic Commentaries and Texts Archive. But that’s really just the start. He’s working toward a comprehensive initiative that would enable cooperative open access publishing ventures aimed at scholastic texts.

For a very different sort of online presence, check out — if you haven’t already — Martin Lenz’s blog. He’s been steadily posting, for the last five months, on all sorts of topics, but especially on the history of philosophy.

I mentioned this a few years ago, but since it continues to grow, let me mention again that Dag Hasse and colleagues continue to build an online Arabic and Latin Glossary, aimed to offer a comprehensive guide to the vocabulary used in medieval Latin translations of Arabic texts (philosophical, medical, scientific).

Finally, in honor of Thanksgiving in this part of the world, our friends at the Franciscan Institute are offering 40% off all of their publications this weekend: Nov. 23 – Nov. 26. Use the code THANKS18. It’s a great opportunity to acquire some essential volumes in any medieval philosophical library.

Laurent Cesalli has received a major grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation for a four-year project on forms of realism in the medieval tradition as compared to the Austrian-German tradition. He has funds for two postdocs and a doctoral student. The project requires scholarly background in both the medieval and later German tradition, and so language skills in both Latin and German. The project starts in April 2019, and interested parties should contact Laurent directly.

Next, a graduate seminar this spring:

The Newberry Library (Chicago) is offering a 10-week graduate seminarthis spring on Boethius’s Consolation ofPhilosophy and its reception, taught by Ian Cornelius (Loyola Chicago). For students at a great many American universities, there looks to be some funding to support attendance. The application deadline is TOMORROW (November 12, 2018). Seminar dates are January 11 – March 15, 2019.

Finally, various conferences:

This coming week, there’s a conference in Bonn on Peter Thomae’s De ente (Universität Bonn, November 16-17, 2018).

Marleen Rozemond and Brian Embry are organizing a conference this spring on Varieties of Unity in Early Modern Philosophy. This is relevant on this blog because the call expressly invites contributions on late-scholastic authors (Groningen, April 12-13, 2019). Cfp deadline is January 10, 2019.

Jamal Rachak (Univ. Cadi Ayyad, Marrakesh) is organizing a symposium this coming April on Philosophy in the Islamic West (Marrakesh, April 25-26, 2019). The call for papers deadline is November 30, 2018. Details here.

Peter Hartman and Kristen Irwin are organizing a conference, Francisco Suárez: Predecessors and Successors, for the spring (Loyola Univ. Chicago, April 26-27, 2019). Note that some funding is available for would-be participants. Application deadline December 31, 2018.

There is a familiar older narrative of medieval philosophy as Christian philosophy. Viewed from that perspective, it is natural to think of the period as running back to its origins in Augustine and forward to its supposed acme in Thomas Aquinas. Although few scholars today conceive of the field that way, the effects of this approach linger in the way we hold onto Augustine (and Boethius) as medieval authors (rather than as figures from late antiquity), and in the way we are still struggling to arrive at a coherent narrative of medieval philosophy after Aquinas.

The effects also linger in the language training we insist on. Of course, there is Latin. But what (aside from English) comes after that? I still remember, as an undergraduate at Penn, holding in my hands for the first time a copy of the old printed Jobs for Philosophers. (Perhaps I should have inserted a trigger warning before now, to let folk know I would be mentioning this old source of so much trauma.) Having already formed the intention to study medieval philosophy, I looked to see what sort of jobs might be available, and found an ad from Catholic University of America, in which they specified that candidates were expected to know Latin, German, and French. This being my first acquaintance with the job market, it naturally imprinted itself upon me, and I have more or less ever since then regarded this as the ideal language training.

It is surely time to say, though, that this is no longer what graduate students in the field should be learning. Even if Latin, for most, is still the most important thing, I think it is now time to tell students that, if they have the ability to do anything beyond Latin, the next language should be Arabic. And I might go further and say that, for students who have not previously had the opportunity to study French or German, it is better not even to take those up, but to put their energies into better Latin and better Arabic. This is a departure from what I have always told my students, but I think it is time to recognize that this is what the current scholarly situation demands.

Back to the Curriculum

My sense of the growing centrality of Arabic corresponds to the broad consensus of scholars in the field that Arabic material belongs on the survey-course curriculum. Of the 30 syllabi we looked at, 24 included Islamic sources, and 15 included Jewish sources. Although I’ve got only my own changing perspective over the years to go on, I feel fairly sure that this reflects a dramatic change in the field’s orientation over the last few decades. (For those who are shaky on the relation between Arabic and Jewish philosophy, the basic story is that most earlier medieval Jewish philosophy is in Arabic: Isaac Israeli, Ibn Gabirol, Sa‘adia Gaon, Ibn Daud, Ibn Kammūna, Maimonides. After Maimonides, Hebrew becomes the principal language.)

Of course, the challenge of learning Arabic makes it hard for most of us to work on this material at a high level. But it is quite easy to include Arabic (and, more broadly, non-Christian) material into the curriculum. I mentioned in my previous post that Ghazali’s Rescuer fromError is a great text to teach. I just finished a day on Maimonides, which was also great fun. If anything, I would say that there is more accessible material in the Jewish and Muslim traditions than there is in the Christian tradition. For an expert discussion of these issues, see Peter Adamson’s post from last month in the APA Blog. I also wrote a post on this topic a few years back, for this blog, and those old links (including a link to some useful syllabi) are still live.

On the Job Market

There are of course lots of good reasons to include Arabic (and other non-Christian) material in our classes, and you don’t need me to tell you what they are. But there’s one particular issue that might have escaped your attention, which is that the job market is dramatically changing with regard to these issues. Last year there were at least as many jobs focused on medieval Islamic philosophy as there were jobs in medieval Christian philosophy. And the ads that have come out this fall make it clear that this was no fluke. The job at Loyola Marymount, for instance, although it seems to be aimed at an AOS in late medieval Latin/Christian philosophy, explicitly REQUIRES an AOC in “Medieval Arabic Philosophy.” Or consider this AOS at San Jose State University: “History of Philosophy (any historical period). The department welcomes candidates who pursue cross-tradition engagement in doing history of philosophy.” Or this one, from the New College of Florida: “History of philosophy, with expertise in early modern European philosophy and at least one non-European philosophical tradition.” I think we can be fairly confident that, as philosophy departments slowly move to shed their traditionally Eurocentric focus, that we’ll see a lot more of this sort of thing. And that’s great news not just for philosophy in general, but for our field in particular, because it just so happens that we’re working on the one era in which “Western” philosophy was richly engaged with non-European traditions. We need to seize this opportunity with both hands.

As I’ve mentioned before in this thread, I’m teaching a medieval survey class this fall — that’s why I’m making such a fuss over these issues. I thought some might be interested in a halfway report on what I’ve been up to, and how it’s been going.

The class, I should say, is somewhat challenging in its enrollment, with 12 undergraduates and 14 graduate students enrolled. Moreover, the undergraduate population itself contains a tricky mix of some very smart philosophy majors who know nothing of the Middle Ages or even Christianity, and some very smart conservative Catholics with a limited background in philosophy.

But that’s my problem. What you’ll be interested in is what I’m teaching. So here’s the first half of the syllabus, with some annotations.

Judging from my survey of what people teach, this is an unusual choice, and I myself don’t recall ever teaching it before. But I think it’s a really good way to begin a class. If medieval Christians were themselves to construct a survey course such as this, I think this is likely the text they would start with. (It is, in effect, what Peter Lombard starts with!) It’s got what would become the standard medieval theory of signs, and what would become the canonical statement of Augustine’s ethics of using and enjoying. Plus there’s Augustine’s famous discussion of how Christians should treat pagan philosophy like the spoils of the Egyptians, which can be the occasion for a broader discussion of the place of philosophy in the Middle Ages.

Week Two. Al-Ghazali, The Rescuer from Error

I can’t imagine teaching a medieval survey and not teaching this text. And although it certainly didn’t need to come in the second week, it seemed to pair nicely with Augustine in terms of topics, inasmuch as it represents an Islamic attempt to think through the place of philosophy within the medieval context. The prose is accessible, the epistemology is great, and it’s fun to talk about Sufism.

Week Three. Avicenna, selections on the soul from al-Shifa’

Here I used the McGinnis-Reisman excerpts, in their Hackett anthology. This was, I have to say, really hard. I did it because I couldn’t leave Avicenna out, and because I knew it would be fun to talk about the flying man argument (which is found in two different versions in the selections they translate), and because I wanted to talk about Avicenna’s views about the internal senses, which is also contained here, in some detail. I am prepared to make very grandiose claims for the importance of the latter, inasmuch as it seems to me to be — arguably! — the foundational text in the history of cognitive theory. (So I told my students, at any rate.) But the problem is that many stretches of this reading are just flatly incomprehensible to anyone but experts. And since I work very hard to find ways to compel my students to do the reading, it’s a serious drag when a whole week is devoted to material they simply cannot understand. I don’t know what I’ll do about this, in the future. Perhaps I’ll do more to cut the reading down to its most essential bits.

Week Four. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theol. 1a qq. 75-76

If you’re going to do just a bit of Aquinas on human nature, I think this is the bit to do. It contains the arguments for the soul as not a body, and as immaterial and imperishable, and also the arguments for the soul as unified with the body, and for the rejection of the plurality of substantial forms. And more. But, as it played out in class, I’m not sure it actually went that well. Perhaps the problem is that, as you will have noticed, I’d been jumping around so much from one kind of thing to another that I hadn’t really laid any sort of foundation for diving into Aquinas. On paper, I had thought that the Avicenna reading would do that for me. But it was too hard, so didn’t serve that purpose, and the stuff in Avicenna that I talked about didn’t help with this material from Aquinas. I’ve taught this material on human nature countless times, but never felt so challenged to make it intelligible — I think because it contains so many presuppositions that the students really needed to have on board in advance. I’ll need to rethink this next time.

Week Five. Peter Abelard, Ethics

Another work I can’t imagine leaving out. Super accessible prose, with no technical language. The view defended is interesting, and lends itself readily to discussion with any audience. Did you know that Abelard’s arch rival, Bernard of Clairvaux, is credited with some version of the (seemingly anti-Abelardian) saying “Hell is full of good intentions?” Well, you probably did know it. But I didn’t until my student Roman Dougherty told me.

Week Six. John Duns Scotus, ethical selections

When I read through Thomas Williams’ new translation of Scotus’ ethical works (which largely overlaps with Wolter’s old volume, but is a vast improvement), I made various notes to the effect of “this is obligatory in an undergraduate survey!!” In the end, what I decided to select was

Ordinatio II.6.2 on the dual affections of will (the fullest statement of his anti-eudaimonism)

Ordinatio III.34, a very interesting general discussion of virtue theory, aimed at the question of how we individuate the virtues. Scotus thinks our ordinary taxonomy of the four cardinal and three theological gives us only “mid-level genera,” and that the true dispositions are much more fine-grained and situationally defined.

Ordinatio III.37, where Scotus takes up the question of which principles from the decalogue have the necessity of natural law (only those of the first table) and which are in some sense contingent (all the rest). This is the fundamental text for questions about whether Scotus is some kind of divine command theorist.

The first and third of these, it seems to me, should be absolute classics of medieval philosophy. And although this is Scotus we’re talking about, the material is not horribly difficult. Just ordinarily difficult. This is the first time I’d taught these texts, and I was pleased with how the class seemed to go.

Week Seven. Proofs of God’s Existence

I don’t have a lot of patience for this stuff, so we went really quickly, covering all of the following:

Anselm, Monologion chs. 1-4

Aquinas’s Five Ways

Proslogion chs. 1-5 plus exchange with Gaunilo

Of course we didn’t really cover all of that, but I have a fondness for the argument from perfect goodness in Monologion ch. 1, so we spent an undue amount of time on that, then I gestured broadly toward the five ways, and then we banged our head against the ontological argument for a while.

Week Eight. Aquinas, Summa theol. 1a qq. 3-10

I think this stuff on the divine nature — simplicity, goodness, omnipresence, eternality, etc. — is just sensationally fun to teach. It really shows Aquinas at his systematic best, and it’s much easier to get a grip on (I now realize!) than the above material on human nature.

So that’s how far I’ve gotten — 7 more weeks to go.

Let me just mention one more feature of the class. For the first time, I’m experimenting with annotating the readings, and I feel as if this has been very helpful to the students. My quick and dirty method of annotation is to add notes to pdf documents, like here. (All the readings are available on the course web page.) But what I’m working toward is my own proprietary method of presenting texts, in which I turn the whole document on its side and then run the text down the middle, with comments on either side in the margins. See here for an example. It was, at first, a rather time-consuming process, because the formatting can’t be done in Word. (I ended up teaching myself how to do it in Adobe InDesign.) But I’m hoping that students will find it worthwhile, and of course once one begins doing this, one can keep building up the annotations from semester to semester.

Please feel free to use for your own purposes any of the works that I’ve formatted in this way. And if you and your students find them helpful, I’d be very glad to know about it. It will encourage me to do more. I’m starting to suspect that if our texts are going to get any traction with students, they will require some kind of annotation of this sort, going well beyond the bounds of what ordinarily gets done in published translations.

The University of Saint Thomas (Houston) is advertising THREE tenure-track positions, all of which require “facility with the Latin texts of Thomas Aquinas.” Weirdly, these positions are not advertised on philjobs.org. The deadline is November 5, 2018.

The one-year Solmsen Fellowships at Wisconsin-Madison are being advertised. These are aimed at “scholars working in the humanities on European history, literature, philosophy, politics, religion, art and culture in the classical, medieval, and/or early modern periods before 1700.” Application deadline is November 1, 2018.